If you have your own Facebook page, you might already be using it for marketing your videos. However, getting views and engagement on your videos can be quite difficult due to Facebook’s algorithm. In this article, I want to share with you a few ideas on how to get more people to engage with your videos on Facebook and how to drive more viewers to your YouTube channel or website.

At first, we need to be aware that there are two types of videos on Facebook:

• A 3rd-party video is a video that is embedded from other platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo
• A native Facebook video is a video that you have uploaded to Facebook directly.

Facebook treats native videos differently than 3rd-party videos. If you’ve ever shared a YouTube video on Facebook, you might have noticed it yourself: it’s pretty hard to get people to engage! You might get a few Facebook likes, but the traffic often won’t convert into many new YouTube subscribers. Sometimes it can be hard to get people to watch your video at all!

When I started doing YouTube I expected a slow but linear growth of my channel. My idea was to put out a lot of videos to build a big subscriber base. The more subscribers I’d have, the more they would help me to promote my videos.

Based on my observations of other people’s channels, I would probably need at least 200 videos to get to 60,000 views/month (with each video getting 300 views per month) and I was willing to put in that work. Fast forward a year later and my channel gets about 100,000 views/month. That is about 166% more than I was hoping for and 500% of what I’d had. Did it take me 200+ videos to get there? Not exactly. How many did it take? 6.

How come my estimate was off by so much?

Once in a while I get an email or a private message through one of my channels which turns out to be an offer from a Multi-Channel Network (MCN).

Although my ego often feels flattered to get these, I have declined every offer so far — and in this article I want to explain to you not only why, but I will also tell you more about MCNs in general and discuss whether it makes sense to sign up or not.

What is a Multi-Channel Network?

Before we dive deeper, however, let’s define the term: what are Multi-Channel Networks (MCNs) exactly?

According to YouTube, MCNs are companies that offer YouTube creators help “with their programming, funding, cross-promotion, partner management, digital rights management, monetization/sales, or audience development.”

That sounds like a lot of help you could be getting.

In reality, the services most MCNs offer are more limited and most MCNs are known for providing some of the following benefits to YouTube creators: